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One of the key aims of this book is to offer a synthesis of the main findings of current research on age. It is intended as an outline survey and consequently the scope of the book is deliberately broad: it covers two centuries, considers the large land mass of Western Europe with its diverse languages, customs and cultures, and ranges across the social spectrum. The book focuses solely on the Christian West, including consideration on the extent to which social rank influenced life expectancy, the methods and goals of upbringing, marriage patterns and funerary memorialisation. The book also demonstrates how extensive that range can be. Examples are drawn from manorial accounts, tax assessments, spiritual writings, didactic literature, romances, elegies, art and architecture. The main thrust is that age formed an essential part of a person's identity in late medieval Europe. During adolescence, men and women progressively took on their adult roles. Three chapters are devoted to educating girls. The book discusses young people's period of transition between childhood and adulthood. It draws attention to pious young women who fought against marriage and wanted a chaste life. Divergences between northern and southern Europe in terms of marriage patterns, family formation, opportunities for women and attitudes towards death and its rituals are discussed. The book shows that attitudes towards the undeveloped young meant that children had few legal responsibilities. Another aim of the book is to consider the changing opportunities and possibilities for people as they progressed through life.
This love ought to be sensible on the part of the husband, perfect on the part of the wife, and heartfelt on the part of both. First, marital love ought to be sensible on the part of the man because a man ought to love his wife sensibly and appropriately—unlike many who love their wives too ardently and inappropriately. Criticising such men, Seneca says that love of a woman’s appearance is the oblivion of reason , akin to insanity; it
educational experience shaped his sensibility, his view of himself and of the world. Tom Inglis’s essay (Chapter 9) offers a sociological reading of McGahern’s representations of love, courtship and sex. Drawing on a few key texts, Inglis aims to show how McGahern chronicles and dramatises cultural shifts and attitudes in twentieth-century Ireland, particularly the sometimes fraught transition from a repressed, traditional, Catholic society to one striving towards a more fully formed sense of self and more open to the pursuit of love, passion and sexual pleasure. Marital
follows Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, two KGB agents who have lived most of their adult lives undercover as a married couple in the United States. They share a bed and have raised two children together (the oldest is a young teenager), but, while they are more than partners, they are not really a romantic couple. Elizabeth has a lover and admits to Philip that “it [marital love
firstly the home of Susan and Richard, the space that the couple have temporarily left to find their marital love again in romanticism. But this space contains a foreign element in the form of the Mexican nanny, working illegally in the USA. She lives symbolically in an ethnoscape in the sense of Appadurai ( 1996 ). When a relative appears to take her to a wedding in Mexico she agrees after some hesitation and takes the children of the American couple with her. Unlike the long-distance travel of American tourists, this trip has a clear telos: home
Even as Nick nurtures the memory of his first night with his first lover, Leo Charles, he fears being left behind by ‘the great heterosexual express’ which the rest of ‘this efficiently reproductive species’ seems ready to board.26 When Nick visits Rachel in the bedroom which she shares with Gerald, he sees himself as ‘as an intruder in the temple of marital love; his own love fantasies had taken envious possession of it, like squatters, in the married couple’s absence.’27 Here, late in his time with the Feddens and just before Gerald commands him to leave, Nick self
worse than what not only disfigures the soul but also makes it miserable? What is more miserable than always being wearied by desire for things, the enjoyment of which can never satisfy you?’ (283). As Richard outlines, the problem with the four degrees of love is that, ultimately, they cannot fit the normative structure of marital love. The feedback loop that is the love one would find in human relationships, one which is (theoretically) reciprocal and fulfilled (by penis-in-vagina sex, for example), is
105 20/10/08 14:00:14 106 Jack Rosenthal marriage is introduced in humorous terms. At the tea-shop where they first meet, Diana and Aileen learn that there is only one scone left and chorus in unison, ‘We’ll share!’ Diana’s plan is presented as a profound expression of marital love, as Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat argue in the section of their website entitled ‘Spiritually Literate Films’.50 The American title for Wide-Eyed and Legless, The Wedding Gift, places the film’s entire moral and narrative weight on this element of the plot. While the ‘wedding’ refers
passage; when describing the sexual act the sentences were short and to the point, whereas the sentence in question was lengthy and long-winded in its description of sex’s celestial virtues. This tension between the medical language used for sexual instruction and the spiritual discourses required to communicate Catholic teachings on marital love represented a recurrent motif in PECFM ’s narrative
, Which is the right Antenor, thou or it. Note This poem demonstrates Philips’s keen interest in the striking imagery characteristic of metaphysical poets, and especially that of John Donne, as here she deploys paradox and spatial imagery and compares marital love to the workings of a mechanical device (compare Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, another poem about parting from a spouse or lover with similar features). 153 Women poets of the English Civil War A Retired Friendship, to Ardelia, 23rd August 1651 1. Come, my Ardelia, to this bower Where, kindly